hey guys its the time of year where my mom is starting to guilt trip me into voting for Biden again!
my opinion on voting is real simple: i will vote for a candidate who has policies i like. that's it. I do not like Bidens policies - i do not like him as a candidate - the only conceivable reason to vote him is because he's Not Trump™. I'll vote for any candidate with a fucking selling point, any candidate that gives me a reason to vote. I'll vote for a candidate who wants to institute Medicare for all, or who wants to defund the military and end the MIC, or one who supports aid to Palestine, or one who wants to build high speed rail lines criss-crossing America, or one who wants to institute public housing, or raise the taxes on the rich or mmm
anything! even ONE of those policies would be enough to get me to vote. but no. the only reason i would even theoretically vote for Biden is because he's 99% Hitler as opposed to 100% Hitler.
If you believe in any of those policies or ideals, of socialism and justice and equality and the end of climate change and a brighter future, and still vote for Biden, you have no fucking backbone.
Let's put the Biden-Trump thing aside. It's a fairly straightforward consequence of the "first past the post" electoral system (used pretty much universally in the US) that most voters will tend to coalesce around two main parties, that third-party or independent candidates are pretty much doomed to failure, and that voting for third-party or independent candidates, or not voting at all, very often has the effect in practice of electing someone whom the voter/non-voter would prefer not be elected.
The only thing likely to ever break this dynamic is switching to an alternative electoral system. There are lots of proposals on how to do this: ranked choice voting (aka “instant runoff” voting, aka “single transferable vote”), approval voting, “final five” voting, and many more. None of them are perfect, none of them can be perfect. But most of them would be an improvement over what we have now, by providing more people with an opportunity to vote for someone more closely aligned with their own political positions, while making it less likely that exercising that opportunity would result in the election of their least preferred candidate.
So for people out there who can’t bring themselves to vote for Joe Biden or other Democratic candidates, please consider putting some energy into working to reform the electoral system so that your future self might have a better choice of candidates to vote for.
